Re: timid lurker seeks help

[Andrew Pam <avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>   Elementary, my dear Pam...  ;-)) I'm not mystified at all. 
>   Roughly speaking, allowing transclusion of text fragments 
>   within _present_ HTML framework opens up a whole can of, er, 
>   parser worms. For starters it'd mean equipping the clients
>   with much additional intelligence to distinguish and keep
>   track of the nested document states, and to suppress and/or
>   enhance cascades of tags nested within higher-level tags.

Well, this is of course why Ted has always advocated external mark-up
rather than in-line SGML style.  I still think it would be worth
proposing such a mark-up standard.

>   I don't think present WWWLibs on which majority of clients
>   are based are up to job and, anyway, transclusion is too
>   complex and definitive a concept not to have been designed 
>   in right from the start.

That's probably true, but I am continuing to encourage developers and
researchers in this field to explore the less well-trodden paths of
Xanadu functionality such as transclusions.  The Hyper-G team certainly
seemed to be interested in the concept.

> Besides, all that would require more, much bigger memory partitions
> for the already RAM- thirsty clients, bigger by a magnitude.

I don't think this is much of a problem; the RAM required for today's
fancy video and 3D clients is probably more than sufficient to implement
more powerful linking models.

Share and enjoy,
		*** AVATAR ***
-- 
<mailto:avatar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>                  Andrew Pam
<http://www.aus.xanadu.com/xanadu/>             Coordinator, Xanadu Australia
<http://www.glasswings.com.au/GlassWings/>      Technical Editor, Glass Wings
<http://www.sericyb.com.au/sc/>                 Manager, Serious Cybernetics
P.O. Box 409, Canterbury VIC 3126 Australia     Phone +61 3 96511511